Beat of a Different Drummer : Hollywood High’s Band Reaches for the Stars: Spot in Parade

It isn’t as if the youngsters in the Hollywood High School marching band--all 19 of them--have to be told that they aren’t exactly the best band in the world.

Mostly immigrant students from Latin America, Soviet Armenia and elsewhere, some haven’t been in this country long enough to master English, much less get accustomed to marching and playing “Yankee Doodle” at the same time.

But they do “get straight A’s for determination,” said band director Joe Montgomery.

Since the last of the school’s tattered band uniforms had to be thrown out several years ago, band members have supplied their own white jeans and sneakers to go with the red imitation-satin jackets provided by the school.

At one point last year, they were down to six members, making it impossible for the once-mighty Marching Sheiks to spell out the letter H, not to mention Hollywood.

Now, things are beginning to look brighter for the Hollywood High School marching band. Student fund-raisers and private donations have raised thousands of dollars for 50 new band uniforms, and supporters are rallying to help the band in its quest to march in the annual Hollywood Christmas Parade.

Word came last week that the band’s bid to be in the lineup had been rejected because it is no match for some of the nation’s showier high school marching bands.

“They think we’re not good enough, but we could show them if we had the chance,” said 15-year-old Jairo Medina, whose family moved here from Guatemala last year. He plays bells.

A spokesman for the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, the parade’s sponsor, said that although the chamber regrets not having the hometown band participate, it is obligated to “protect the quality” of the nationally televised parade.

“We don’t enjoy being cast as the heavies here,” said Larry Kaplan, the chamber’s executive director. “We want to do what we can to support the band so that it can qualify in the future.”

However, critics of the decision, including at least one member of the chamber’s executive board, lambasted the group for not making an exception for Hollywood’s only high school.

“This is a classic case of the chamber being more interested in Hollywood the image than Hollywood the community, and that’s a crying shame,” businessman and supporter Michael Kellerman said.

This isn’t the first time the band has been left out of the parade.

In fact, it has been seven years since Hollywood High was invited. And that was only after Lorraine Bradley, who teaches at the school, persuaded her father, Mayor Tom Bradley, to intercede on the band’s behalf.

Even then, the band never got on television.

“They put us at the rear of the parade, behind the Santa Claus float,” teacher George Boerner recalls.

It wasn’t always that way. For decades, tradition dictated that the Hollywood High band, sometimes with as many as 70 members and backed by drill teams of up to 100 girls, led the parade.

The 85-year-old school, at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Highland Avenue, is one of the area’s oldest institutions. Among its former students are numerous celebrities, including Lana Turner and Carol Burnett.

But the school has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. Once most students were white and middle class, but foreign pupils now make up an estimated 80% of the school’s more than 2,000 students.

“It’s different from when all the girls wanted to twirl batons and the boys wanted to play the trumpet,” said Assistant Principal Dick Rippey, who attended Hollywood High in the 1950s and has worked there for 24 years. “A lot of our kids now have to help support their families. For them, playing in the band is a frill.”

Compounding matters, a lack of public money has led to cutbacks in the school’s music program, and there have also been cuts at the junior high level, meaning that more students are entering high school without a basic music background.

In contrast, the parade’s fortunes have never been better.

At one time a struggling hometown event, the parade last year drew an estimated 16.5 million TV viewers, with hundreds of thousands of spectators lining the parade route.

Chamber officials now consider the parade a rival of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York, and say this year’s event, on Nov. 26, featuring Grand Marshal Sammy Davis Jr. and a host of other celebrities, will be the biggest yet.

With more than 1,000 high school bands wanting to participate, the chamber could afford to pick the cream of the crop. It chose seven, including bands from New Jersey, Idaho and Illinois.

“OK, so our band isn’t in that league, but why not let us do something, even if it’s just carrying a banner that says Hollywood?” band leader Montgomery said.

Meanwhile, band members are buoyed by the promise of 50 new uniforms expected to arrive in a couple of weeks. They were purchased with money from student fund-raisers and private donations, including $2,800 from the chamber itself.

“I understand the chamber’s position,” Montgomery said. “I just feel bad for these kids. We may not be the best, but we also don’t think we would embarrass anyone.”